Christie: GOP Should ‘Show Up’ for Minority Votes

WASHINGTON (AP) — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Sunday offered his Republican Party a prescription to win: show up.

Christie, fresh off a 22-percentage point win for re-election, said the GOP must go into Hispanic and black communities, talk with seniors and campaign in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas. It’s what helped him become the first New Jersey Republican in a quarter century to capture more than 50 percent of the vote.

It also has done nothing to tamp down chatter about a 2016 presidential bid, something many have encouraged.

“I know everybody is going to be speculating about what may come in my future and lots of other people’s future in our party. But the fact is, I am focused on being the governor of New Jersey and being the chairman of the Republican Governors Association,” Christie said on “Fox News Sunday,” one of the four television news shows he appeared on Sunday. “And I think those two jobs will keep me pretty busy over the next year.”

It’s the year after that dominates conversations among Republican operatives, donors and rivals.

Asked directly whether he would serve all four years of his second term, which starts in 2014, Christie hedged: “Listen, who knows? I don’t know.”

Republicans are searching for a candidate who is true to the party’s beliefs, can appeal to voters in swing-voting states and can help the part win the presidency for the first time since 2004.

Christie’s win on Tuesday made him an appealing option.

“I got 61 percent of the vote in the state of New Jersey in a blue state that had just re-elected Barack Obama a year ago by 17 points,” Christie said. “That was nearly a 40-point turnaround between voting for a Democrat at the top of the ticket and voting for a Republican.”

Christie attributed his win to reaching out to traditionally Democratic demographic groups.

“Getting 51 percent of the Hispanic vote, I’m very proud of that,” he said. “Because I’ve worked hard with the Hispanic community to let them see how our policies can help their families. I’ve worked hard with the African American community. I’ve worked hard with seniors and students.”

Christie said the reason for his win was simple: better-than-average showing at the polls from minorities and Democrats.

“If you want to win a vote by that kind of margin, if you want to attract the majority of the Hispanic vote, if you want to nearly triple your African American vote, you need to show up, you need to go into those neighborhoods, you need to campaign in places,” Christie said.

Exit polls say Christie also carried one-third of Democrats and two-thirds of those who called themselves independents.

That’s not to say Christie is a natural fit for the GOP. He has favored an overhaul to the nation’s immigration laws that includes a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally. He is not opposed to some gun control measures. And he’s been critical of some of the tea party’s most popular figures in Washington.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a 2012 presidential contender who is weighing another White House campaign, said voters would have to judge Christie’s record as he visits early nominating states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

“Is a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the country?” Perry said in an interview taped during a visit to Des Moines, Iowa. “We’ll have that discussion at the appropriate time.”

Find Out What Your Favorite Celebrities Did This Week On Instagram (09/23-09/29)

7 thoughts on “Christie: GOP Should ‘Show Up’ for Minority Votes”

Youre so right. Im there with you. Your blog is definitely worth a read if anybody comes across it. Im lucky I did because now Ive obtained a whole new view of this. I didnt realise that this issue was so important and so universal. You certainly put it in perspective for me.

Take your minds back when President Obama won the first AND second elections. Republicans SAID they were going to reach out to minorities. They recognized that it was necassary because they were out of touch. Here are we years later and they haven’t done a thing. I admire Christy for speaking out, but talk it cheap. I’m REALLY curious to see them reach out for real. I don’t think the majority really cares about minorities to be honest.

Yeah, Ok. So the Blowhard, “Elephant In The Room” bully is bragging about showing up. It takes more than showing up, it takes standing up for issues that will positively affect those “minorities” lives.
Unfortunately, too many fall for the okydoke ( a hug with Obama) and have an extremely short attention span on what has happened in N.J. the past 5 years. N.J> is a blue collar state with a mojority of Union workers and yet these people vote aginst their own interests ( sound familiar) It should’cause so many are doing it these days. I dont want someone to show up I want someone to do something. Christie’s policies arent too far removed from the Tea Party if you look at his record. He is very deceptive..

I have always viewed Christie’s street cred as that he is a straight shooter- willing to say the hard things so people don’t get the wrong impression.

Christie and his surrogates are pointing to his success against Bouno as indicative of future success in 2016 for a Republican like him that offers the willingness to compromise with Democrats as someone actually capable of beating the future Democratic nominee for President.

Where Christie moves away from his straight-shooting is when he moves from official election results and into the musings of the 2013 NJ Exit Poll results in relation to Republican’s perspectives for 2016. Anyone wanting to use 2013 NJ Exit Polling answers to discuss potential for 2016, need to start with the only question on the exit poll that mentions 2016 and once they have exhausted that question, and only if there is any time left, there could be extra credit discussion about how a large national known current governor that got the support of his party and had just gotten billions of federal dollars in aid for his state was able to be considered preferable to most NJ voters as compared to a relatively unknown contender that did not get serious support from her party.

Some might argue that the Exit poll question about a 2016 matchup with Clinton was only hypothetical and thus the respondents answers to it were less serious and thoughtful than their answers about who they voted for. Because only 4% omitted an answer, it would seem that those that finished the survey were serious enough to give an honest answer. Therefore, the question is not disqualified.

Based on that question NOT being disqualified, then it needs to be the first question and set of responses for those wanting to discuss Christie’s potential performance for 2016. They can point to the top level number that indicates Christie get 44% vs Clinton’s 48% which is clearly better than Romeny’s 41% vs Obama’s 58%. But in comparison to the Romney performance, it must be noted that the NJ data for the 2013 governor election compared to the 2012 presidential- it had 40% fewer total voters, 4% fewer Democrats, voters <$30K per family dropped from 15% of voters to 9%. All of these factors could potentially point to the 2013 Christie/Clinton question
actually overestimating a Republican’s performance because the electorate is more Republican and independent with significant fewer lower income voters than in a presidential year.
Where the pundit discussion of the Exit Poll results goes completely off the rails is in the discussion of gender and racial demographics. That is because the respondents to the Exit Poll were much more likely to indicate a preference for Clinton over Christie as compared to Bouno over Christie if they identified as Hispanic or Black. This information was NOT provided in the base poll information distributed to the media. It was only obtained by citizen curiosity and NOT by curiosity of political reporters and pundits that are supposed to be paid to be curious and to eek out the best information available instead of just droning out talking point factoids that are clearly less illustrative of the currently measurable NJ voter preference for 2016.

I was able to coax the NYT to give me the data on the racial crosstab for the Clinton question. I followed that up with a request for the gender crosstab but have not been given a response back from the NYT.

It seems the Romney team admits its polling assessment team was using skewed results and that contributed tothem not knowing which states they were on track to win and lose. We don’t need to start the 2016 cycle with using skewed factoids about
comparison to Bouno when factoids about comparison to Clinton exist and we do not want skewed factoid to set Republicans up for a repeat of polling failure.

Good GOTV is totally dependent on good polling. What we really might want is a Nate Silver clone that wants a Republican to win. Even if we don’t get the Nate Silver clone, we need to be candid and not rely on factoids that we know misrepresents the situation.

Please stop with all the “hype” about Chris Christie and check his real record. He’s a Republican and that said a lot. He took so much money from NJ public school budget that it was determined unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. He spent over $28 million of tax payer’s money to hold a special election for Cory Booker to avoid Cory Booker’s name being on the ballad (under Democrats) during the regular election on November 5th.
The first time he was elect was a very low voter turnout in New Jersey. One of the first bills he signed after getting elected that first term was a tax relief for the wealthy. He’s vetoed minimum wage increase and now this last election New Jersey residents voted for an increase. He’s held up medicinal marijuana plants from operating. He refused to observe gay marriage until time became closer to the election last week. He’s anti-union.
Our property taxes have not decrease since he’s been in office. Businesses are leaving New Jersey left and right because it’s too costly to operate in this state. Auto insurance in New Jersey is one of the highest in the nation and each company has to have special agents to write up a policy here.
Just because he was nice to President Obama after the Hurricane Sandy disaster doesn’t mean he changed his stripes.
This last governor Election Day again was one of the lowest voter turn outs. Only 20% black people voted for him. The Democrats here in New Jersey turned their backs on Bouno for political reason. Christie played politics and bought a lot of democrats out for this election. Christie went to Hispanic areas just before Election Day and played politics with those communities.
Don’t think for one moment that the majority of New Jersey residents are in good shape or people of color are better off since he’s been in office. Do your homework before releases these news articles and television editorials.
This governor plays a good political game because he has many fooled. The different between Chris Christie and his Capitol Hill counterparts and his Tea Party people is that he will never call President Obama a monkey or disrespectful name like the others, but he’s still a BIG TIME REPUBLICAN and only cares about the rich white man. Do your homework.
I don’t necessarily vote for people that look like me; I vote for people that think like me.
If you want the real story of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie then do your research on his record for the last 4 years. New Jersey is not any better than it was before he became governor.